EDITORIALLY S P E A K I N G The greatest thing in chemistry is a great chemist. On June 15, 1959, Samuel Colville Lind will be eighty years old. He has spent 54 of those years in chemistry, 29 in universities, 13 in government service, and 12, after retirement, in his present position as consultant a t Oak Ridge. The length of his career is unusual in itself, hut from the standpoint of chemical education i t has a particular interest, since Lind is one of the last of those chemists who, around the beginning of the century. went to Germany for advanced training. A native of Tennessee, Lind received his bachelor's degree a t Washington and Lee University. He started to major in classics, but a university requirement led him to elect the elementary chemistry course in his senior year. Professor James L. Howe, an expert on the platinum metals, was so winning a teacher that Lind determined to make chemistry his career. He returned for an extra year to complete his elementary training in chemistry and then moved to M.I.T. for two years, receiving the B.S. in 1902. After a year as assistant in analytical chemistry, M.I.T. awarded him a Dalton Traveling Fellowship, for a year of study at Ostwald's laboratory in Leipzig, then the mecca of American physical chemists. Ostwald was relatively inactive in research and, partly by chance, Lind sought a problem from Bodenstein, who set him to studying the thermal reaction between bromine and hydrogen. Bodenstein had previously discovered that the kinetics of the analogous system, hydrogen-iodine, were quite straightforward, conforming to a secondorder equation. Lind discovered a quite different r e lationship in the case of bromine, and the kinetic eqnation ~ h i c hhe obtained remained unexplained for thirteen years. Some fifty years have, however, not altered its validity and the research stands as one of the classics of chemical kinetics. It is almost invariably quoted as an elegant example in textbooks of elementary physical chemistry. Armed with the Ph.D. for this work, he joined the staff of the TJniversity of Michigan. After five years he obtained a leave of absence to study the newer branches of chemistry for a year in Europe. The first part of the year was spent in Marie Curie's laboratory in Paris, where he was introduced to experimental radioactivity. He carried out research on the combination of hydrogen and bromine and on the decomposition of hydrogen hromide under alpha-ray bombardment. He spent the latter part of the year in Vienna a t the new Institut fur Radiumforschnng where he studied the ozonization of
oxygen by alpha rays, measuring for the first time both the amount of chemical change and the ionization produced in the same medium. In 1913 he joined the Bnreau of Mines as the expert on radioactivity to take part in their program for isolating some eight grams of radium from Colorado carnotite. This understaking was sponsored jointly by the Bureau of Mines and the National Radium Institute, which had been formed to obtain radium for experimental therapeutic uses. At the end of the production operations about half a gram of radium was in excess of the amount, required by the National Radium Institute, and this was made available to him for experimental work on chemical reactions initiated by radiation. He did the first of this a t Golden, Colorado, and continued it after 1920 in Reno, Nevada, and after 1923 when he succeeded R. B. Moore as chief chemist of the Bnreau of Mines a t Washington, D. C. He left the Bureau of Mines in 1925 to become associate director of the Fixed Nitrogen Laboratory of the Department of Agriculture. Finally, in 1926, he returned to academic life as Director of the School of Chemistry of the University of Minnesota. Nine years later he was made Dean of the Institute of Technology, a position he held until his retirement. After retiring in 1947 he returned to Tennessee, becoming a technical consultant a t Oak Ridge. From 1951 to 1954 he was Acting Director of the Chemistry Division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The half gram of radium which he used a t the Bnreau of Mines was loaned to him on his departure and was used by him and his students throughout his career. S. C. Lind's service to chemistry and chemists has been monumental. From 1908 to 1929 he served Chemical Abstracts and later was on the editorial board of JACS and Chemical Monographs. From 1933 to 1951 he was editor of the Journal of Physical Chemistry. His authoritative monograph, "The Chemical Effects of Alpha Particles and Electrons," first pnblished in 1928 is currently undergoing its third revision. Among the many honors he has received, the ACS chose him President in 1940 and Priestley medalist in 1952. Radiation chemists universally regard S. C. Lind as their esteemed dean. His pioneering work on the quantitative measurements of chemical change and ionization is the foundation of the science. It is most fitting that the symposium designed to set forth the present state of knowledge in historical perspective be called the Lind Jubilee Symposium on the Development of Radiation Chemistry. Volume
36, Number 6, June 1959
/
261
